The White Hotel (13 page)

One may easily conceive the young girl’s loneliness and misery, deprived so cruelly of her mother, abandoned by her aunt and uncle (as it must have seemed), and treated indifferently by her father. Fortunately she was in the care of sensible and devoted attendants, particularly her governess. By the age of twelve or thirteen, Anna could speak three languages besides her native Ukrainian, was familiar with good literature, and demonstrated a considerable degree of talent in music. She enjoyed dancing, and was able to attend ballet classes at the
lycée
. This had the advantage of giving her an opportunity to form friendships, and she became, by her own account, quite sociable and popular. Altogether, then, she survived the loss of her mother better than many, or perhaps most, children would have done.

When she was fifteen, an unpleasant incident occurred which left its mark on her. There were political disturbances; an uprising of the fleet; violence and street demonstrations. The patient, with two friends, ventured imprudently into the docks area of the city, to observe events. Because of their genteel dress and appearance they were threatened and insulted by a group of insurgents. No physical harm was done to the girls, but they were badly frightened. What affected the patient more was the attitude of her father, when she returned home. Instead of comforting her, he coldly rebuked her for having exposed herself to danger. Perhaps he was merely hiding his concern, and was genuinely upset at the grave risk his daughter had run; but for the young girl his hostile air was the final proof that he cared nothing for her. Henceforth she returned reserve for reserve, coldness for coldness. It was not long after this episode that she had her first
experience of the breathless condition, which was treated as asthma but to no avail. After several months it subsided of its own accord.

Shortly after her seventeenth birthday, she left Odessa, and her father’s house, for St Petersburg, on no other basis than the prospect of an audition with a ballet school. She was without friends in the capital, and had no means of support except for a small inheritance from her mother which she was now old enough to claim. She was successful in her audition, and lived frugally in a rented room in a poor quarter of the city. She formed an attachment with a young man living in the house: a student, A., who was strongly involved in the movement for political reform. He introduced her to a circle of friends of like commitment.

Her interest in the political struggle was wholly subordinate to her involvement with A. She brought to her first love all the pure and generous ardor of that state; their relationship was an
affaire de cœur
, not of the flesh. But after a while he abandoned her for more important concerns—the coming conflagration. Almost at the same time she was abandoned by her chosen profession: not because she failed in skill or application, but simply that she was becoming a woman, and gaining flesh which she could not lose, even though she was eating next to nothing. She was forced to conclude that nature did not intend her for a prima ballerina. Fortunately, at this distressing time, one of her ballet teachers, a youthful widow who lived alone, befriended her, and invited her to share her home until she had planned what to do with her life. Madame R. became her mentor as well as her friend. They went to concerts and theatres together, and during the day, while Madame R. was at the ballet school, Anna read from her well-stocked library or went for pleasant walks. It was a quiet and happy period in her life, restoring her to good spirits.

The comfortable and mutually convenient arrangement ended when Madame R. unexpectedly decided to remarry. The man in question, a retired naval officer, had become a congenial friend to them both, and Anna had not suspected any special attachment threatening her own tranquil existence. Yet she could not but rejoice at her friend’s well-deserved good fortune. Madame R. and her new husband begged Anna to stay on, but she did not wish to interfere in their happiness. She was uncertain where to go and what to do; but, at just the right moment, an unusually kind fate pushed the young woman towards a new country and a new profession. Her aunt wrote to her from Vienna to say that her father—Anna’s grandfather—who had been living with her for some years had died, and she was alone again. She asked Anna if she would consider coming to live with her, at least for a few months. The young woman did not hesitate to accept the invitation, and left for Vienna, after a sad leavetaking with her kind friend Madame R. and her husband.

Coming face to face with her aunt, for the first time since her mother had been alive, she was overcome by both sadness and happiness. Her first impression was that she was being welcomed by her mother, grown graciously middle-aged.
¹
For her part, her aunt doubtless found many poignant reminders of her sister in this sensitive and intelligent young woman of twenty. Aunt and niece slipped at once into a warm relationship, and Frau Anna never found any cause to regret her decision to leave her native country.

As so often happens, the change of environment brought about changes in Frau Anna herself. She had been brought up by her nurse to a somewhat half-hearted belief in the Catholic religion,
the faith of her mother’s side of the family. During her adolescent years she had drifted away from it, but now, under her aunt’s influence, she became devout. More practically, again as a consequence of being in her aunt’s musical environment, she found an enthusiasm, and a skill, which promised to fill the gap left by the failure of her attempt to become a dancer. Under the tuition of a close friend of her aunt’s, the young woman learned to play the cello; and rather to her astonishment discovered that she was highly talented musically. She made such rapid progress that her teacher was predicting, within a few months, that she might become a virtuoso performer.

Within three years of her arrival in Vienna, she was playing in a professional orchestra and was also engaged to be married. The man in question was a young barrister of good family, deeply attached to music, who had made her acquaintance during a social occasion at the Conservatorium. The young man was well-mannered, modest and rather shy (a combination that appealed to her), and an attachment very soon grew up. He was thoroughly approved by her aunt, and Anna got on well with his parents. He proposed to her, and—after a very brief struggle between her wish for domestic happiness and a professional musical career—she accepted.

They spent a honeymoon in Switzerland, and then settled into a pleasant house. Her aunt, a frequent and welcome guest, was happy in knowing that a grand-nephew or-niece would soon console her for any pang she felt at being alone again; for she knew how much Anna wanted a child.

The only cloud on the young couple’s horizon was the rumour of war. When hostilities broke out, the husband was called to serve in the army’s legal department. Their farewells were sad, but there was the comfort that he would be out of the combat
zone and was stationed close enough to be able to return home often. They wrote to each other every day, and the patient was fruitfully occupied with her musical career, in a city hungry for the last remnants of civilized culture. Indeed, as her playing improved with experience, her career began to flourish. She had her aunt and plenty of friends for companionship. Altogether, except for the major drawback of being apart from her husband, she was busy and contented.

Just at this time, as her husband was expecting his first home leave, she suffered a recurrence of the breathlessness that had afflicted her in Odessa, and also developed incapacitating pains in her breast and abdomen. She lost all desire to eat, and had to abandon her music. Informing her husband that she had fallen ill, and that she now realized she could never make him happy, she went back to live with her aunt. Her husband, obtaining compassionate leave, came to plead with her, but she remained adamant. Though he would never forgive her for the hurt she was causing him, she begged him to forget her. He had continued to try to win her back; and only in the past few months had he consented to a legal separation. For the past four years Frau Anna had lived in almost total seclusion. Her aunt had taken her to see many doctors, but none had been able to find the cause of her illness or to effect any improvement.

This, then, was the story which the unfortunate young woman told me. It threw no light on the causes of her hysteria. There was, it is true, a rich soil for the growth of a neurosis, notably the early loss of her mother and her father’s neglect. But if the early death of one parent, and the inadequacy of the other, were sufficient grounds for the formation of an hysteria, there would
be many thousands of such. What, in Frau Anna’s case, was the hidden factor which had determined the creation of her neurosis?

What she had in her consciousness was only a secret and not a foreign body. She both knew and did not know. In a sense, too, her mind was attempting to tell us what was wrong; for the repressed idea creates its own apt symbol. The psyche of an hysteric is like a child who has a secret, which no one must know, but everyone must guess. And so he must make it easier by scattering clues. Clearly the child in Frau Anna’s mind was telling us to look at her breast and her ovary: and precisely the left breast and ovary, for the unconscious is a precise and even pedantic symbolist.

For many weeks I was able to make very little progress in my attempt to help her. Partly the circumstances in which we worked were to blame; it was difficult to create an atmosphere of confidence, in an unheated room in winter, with patient and physician dressed in coats, mufflers and gloves.
¹
Also the analysis had often to be interrupted, many days together, when her pains became so distressing that she was forced to take to her bed. There was, however, some remission of her anorexia; I was able to persuade her to take solid food—in so far as nourishing food was obtainable at all in the city at that time.

A much more decisive factor in the slowness of our progress was her strong resistance. Though not as prudish as many of my patients, the young woman was reticent to the point of silence when any question of her sexual feelings and behaviour rose in the course of the discussion. An innocent inquiry, as for example on the subject of childhood masturbation (an almost universal
phenomenon), was met by blank denial. I might, her attitude implied, have been asking the question of the Virgin. I found I had good cause to doubt some of the superficial memories she had related; which did not bode well for any deeper investigation. She was unreliable, evasive; and I became angry at the waste of my time. To be just to her, I should add that I soon learnt to distinguish her truth from her insincerity: if she was hiding something, she fumbled with a crucifix at her throat, as though asking God’s forgiveness. Thus, there was in her a
propensity
for truth, even if only on the grounds of superstition, which made me persevere in helping her.
¹
I was forced to lure the truth out of her, often by throwing out a provocative suggestion. As often as not, she would take the bait, offering a retraction or modification of her story.

One of her retractions related to her affair with A., the student whom she had loved in St Petersburg. So far, she had told me only trivial facts about him: such as that he was a student of philosophy, of wealthy and conservative background, a few years older than she, etc. She stuck to her story that it had been a “white” relationship. I was struck by the adjective she used, and asked her what she associated with the word “white.” She said it conjured up the sails of a yacht; and it seemed reasonable to suppose that she was recalling her father’s yacht. But one should never jump to conclusions in psychoanalysis: she said she was thinking instead of one weekend in Petersburg when she and other members of the political group, including of course A., went out sailing in the Gulf. It was perfect summer weather, and a relief to her to be sailing again and to have a break from the
“serious” discussions which were beginning to bore her and even frighten her. She had never felt so much in love with A., and he was tender towards her, and respectful as always. They had to share a cabin, but he never once tried to touch her; their consciences remained as white as the sails, or as the white nights.
¹

She was nevertheless fumbling with her crucifix, and her face wore an expression of sorrow. I told her, sharply, that she was not telling me the truth, and that I knew there had been a sexual affair. Frau Anna confessed that she had slept with him a few times, towards the end; he had begged and begged her, and at last, almost in weariness, she had “fallen.” “She used the English verb; our discussions were in German, but it was not unusual for her to interject foreign terms now and again. I had learned to be alert to their possible significance.

I decided to “chance my arm,” as the saying goes. “I’m glad you’re being honest,” I said. “There’s nothing to feel ashamed of. And why, while you’re about it, don’t you confess that he got you with child but you lost it in a fall downstairs?”

The poor girl struggled with her feelings, and then admitted that I was right; not downstairs, but from a bad fall in the dance studio. No one had ever known of this, except Madame R., or even suspected it, and she was astonished that I had found out her secret. She asked me how I had been able to tell.

I replied: “Because your story of putting on weight, and so having to stop dancing, didn’t ring true. I should guess
you
would find it difficult to gain weight, at any time, much though it would improve you. It was an obvious way of telling me what happened, indirectly—for you really wanted me to know. You
probably went on dancing too long, in your condition, and were worried sick about
beginning
to put on weight; and generally wondering what to do in an impossible situation.”

The young woman’s silence told me I had struck home all too truly, and I was glad I had not taken my interpretation to its logical end—that by continuing to practise energetically, she had been secretly hoping for just such a consequence; indeed, may even have precipitated it. She was sufficiently disturbed by the bringing to light of her youthful sin.